


Birds of Passage

by bellatemple



Series: But Deadly [9]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Mute Dean Winchester, Muteness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-06
Updated: 2010-11-06
Packaged: 2017-10-26 19:03:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/286811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellatemple/pseuds/bellatemple
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean's been to three funerals in his life.  This is the fourth, and the hardest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Birds of Passage

**Author's Note:**

> Conclusion of my [But Deadly](http://bellatemple.livejournal.com/tag/fic:%20but%20deadly%20'verse) verse, which was started before season four started airing, and thus has a different take on Mary Winchester's history with Azazel. Beta-ed by [](http://roque-clasique.livejournal.com/profile)[**roque_clasique**](http://roque-clasique.livejournal.com/), [](http://missyjack.livejournal.com/profile)[**missyjack**](http://missyjack.livejournal.com/), and [](http://maisfeeka.livejournal.com/profile)[**maisfeeka**](http://maisfeeka.livejournal.com/).

They burned Mary Winchester on the first Monday in May, in an empty field some fifty miles outside of town. Sam kept calling it "cremation", and looked between Bobby and Dean or Jo and Ellen who'd driven out the night before, waiting for someone to say something.

Hell, maybe he was hoping for a chorus of "Amazing Grace." Dean didn't ask.

It was a clear night, warm and dry, and the pyre caught and burned fast, the crack and pop of the tinder the only eulogy. It was a hunter's funeral, quiet, quick, and without ceremony. The way it should be.

Except that the wrong body was burning.

*

Dean had attended three funerals before that night. The first he only remembered as big and dark and far too loud. There was no casket -- John Winchester didn't leave enough behind to be buried -- but giants and strangers had cried and touched Dean's head and Sammy had wailed through the whole thing. Dean wanted to tell him that it was alright, that Mom would come and find them soon, and that _angels were watching over them_ , but the words had all dried up and burned away.

The second had been about the same, possibly even the same church, only instead of Sammy crying it was Julie, a deaf girl from Dean's communication therapy class whose father had been t-boned by a drunk driver. Dean was sixteen, and he stood at her side in the receiving line, lending her his shoulder. Mourners clasped her hands and said "I'm so sorry" and he wanted to scream at them all for taking her words away. Lips and throats were unreliable, and Dean's had burned again, as though he'd only just watched his mother turn and walk back into the fire.

That night during the wake, Dean found Julie in her parents' room, and while her family sang and talked and cried downstairs, Dean and Julie gave their words to each other. Hands were good for talking, but Julie didn't want that, so they taught themselves to use them for other things.

The less said about the third funeral the better, save that smoke had clenched around Dean's throat again and rested there heavily until he'd come back that night with salt and a lighter. Dan and Carrie had never been John and Mary, but Dean knew they deserved to go out right, and funerals had to have a fire.

Dean didn't go to Jess' funeral. She wouldn't have wanted him there. He didn't know if Sam went or not.

It wasn't something they talked about.

*

As the pyre burned down, the others trickled off. Bobby went first, with the bullshit excuse of warming up the truck. Dean couldn't blame him -- the man barely knew Mary, and Bobby had always seemed to value his solitude. Ellen went next, when the fire had burned down to embers. She pressed her hand to Dean's shoulder then Sam's, pulled Jo into a tight hug, and left without saying a word.

Jo didn't stay much longer. She swayed on her feet after her mother left, glancing from Sam to Dean. She wanted to stay, Dean guessed -- though he hadn't been there long, he'd sensed a real bond between Jo and Mary at the Roadhouse -- but something must have told her to leave the remains with Mary's sons. She moved backward for several paces as though she didn't want to turn her back on her friend. Dean didn't hear when she left completely, but he felt her absence just the same.

Dean stayed where he was, feet planted on the ground in a way that felt almost permanent. He didn't plan to move until the pyre was cold -- maybe not even then. He didn't know what Sam planned. His brother had grown harder and harder to read on this odd little roadtrip into Hell.

It was an eternity before Sam opened his mouth.

"Dean," he said, and when Dean didn't react, he said it again, soft and forceful. " _Dean._ "

Dean remained still, his eyes and hands planted as firmly as his feet. He could feel Sam's gaze like the heat of the fire, imagined it drying and cracking his skin. Sam's voice was taut, caught in the same grip that had seized Dean's chest that moment in the cabin, when the smoke of the yellow-eyed man had poured forth from his mouth and into his mother's.

"She saved our lives," Sam said, his words whispered, desperate.

Dean turned his head then to catch Sam's eye, but his hands remained in his pockets.

In the end, Sam left too, and Dean picked up the shovel to bury his mother's ashes.

*

Dean lost count of the number of bodies he'd burned by the time he was twenty. By twenty-one, he stopped expecting to get used to it.

He never knew why Dan and Carrie never smelled it on him, never saw it in his eyes, in the way some days he had trouble bringing himself to look up. Sam, he knew, just saw it as Dean being Dean. As part of his messed up older brother who couldn't be fixed, and most days he seemed to accept that. Accept _Dean_ at face value.

Other days, Dean knew Sam saw right through him.

*

Five was a crowd in Bobby's house, as used as it was to just one aging hunter and his stacks and stacks of old books. Dean preferred the yard anyway, out amongst the old wrecks, and he perched on the Impala's trunk like a bird, a beer bottle held loosely between two fingers.

That was where Jo found him, her hair damp from a shower. He imagined her skin scrubbed clean of the lingering smell of smoke, and thought of Julie.

"Hey," she said, and her voice seemed to echo through the shells of the cars around them.

Dean nodded to her, sipped his beer.

She pushed herself up to sit beside him. "I'm sorry," she said. "I really liked your mom."

Dean dropped his gaze, staring down at their feet on the bumper. Jo wore boots, worn and scuffed like his. He wasn't sure why that surprised him.

Jo's need to fill his silences didn't surprise him at all.

"If you ever want to talk," she said, then cut herself off. "Sorry. That was dumb. I just --"

"I don't." Dean winced at more than just the itching scrape of the words against his throat. His voice sounded harsh and final. He didn't remember how to make it flex, add in all those subtle lifts and twists everyone else used that meant so much. He twisted his head away, setting his beer down to rifle through his pockets.

"Yeah," Jo said, and there it was, the way that one word just drooped at the end. Dean didn't know how to do that. "I said it was dumb." She started to slide down off the trunk, but Dean caught her arm. She looked back and he lifted his brows. She shifted back up, re-securing her place next to him. "Just want company, huh?"

Dean nodded, his attention more on his notebook than on her. He preferred to sign, but he was just as familiar with writing. These words he could twist, and combined with a few facial ticks, he could make them say exactly what he wanted. He swallowed once, then held the page up.

 _Tell me about her?_

Jo looked from the page, then to Dean. "Yeah. I can do that."

*

Sam waited two hours after Jo finally went inside before he came out to find Dean, still sitting on the Impala, now picking at the label on the empty beer bottle. He didn't sit, rather stood in front of Dean, hands shoved into his pockets, shoulders and head dropped lower than necessary just to meet Dean's eyes. He kicked at the gravel. Dean picked at the beer label.

Some people -- maybe even most of them, those that could speak and hear at least -- thought of a silence as a vacuum. They missed the natural noises of the world, the way silences took on shapes and meanings all their own. To them, silences were to be filled with manufactured noises: the sounds of music or the human voice. Life with Dean had broken Sam of that a long time ago, if he'd ever had it. When it was just the two of them, silences could stretch on for hours on end without either of them feeling uncomfortable.

This silence wasn't a comfortable one. This one weighed heavy with words the brothers hadn't yet said, and Dean knew Sam would break it. He just had to be patient.

"What do we do now?" Sam asked. Dean flicked a crumbled bit of label from his jeans, feeling perversely satisfied. The two of them drifted at times, bounced off each other and ricocheted in ways that left Dean doubting how well he really knew his brother. It was good to know that Sam could still be predictable.

Dean set the bottle aside. _Keep going._

Sam caught his wrists, startling Dean. Sam knew better than anyone how much Dean disliked anyone trying to control his hands.

"Dean," Sam said, dropping his chin and looking Dean in the eye, like he hadn't just broken Dean's cardinal rule. " _Talk_ to me."

Dean looked from his trapped hands to Sam and scowled. Sam shook his head.

"You know what I mean."

Dean did. And it hurt. Dean could talk, yes, could force air through his vocal chords and shape his mouth into sounds. He'd proven that, to himself and to all the people he'd cared about over the last six months, ever since the yellow-eyed man had forced that first, desperate "no" from him in Palo Alto. That didn't mean he liked it. That he was good at it. That it didn't _hurt_ on some fundamental level, beyond just the strain of using unfamiliar, atrophied muscles. That it didn't hurt even more now, even without the blocks their mother had placed in him all those years ago. Words now would just be exhalations of bitter smoke, leaving his mouth tasting of ash.

He jerked his hands in Sam's grip, glaring harder, twisting his fingers into something that might read as an explanation, if he could complete the right movements.

Sam only held on harder.

"Dean, _please._ "

A tortured squeak made its way up Dean's throat. He swallowed it, refusing to let it out into the open air, instead hissing through his teeth to let Sam know what he thought of the raw plea, the manipulation. But Sam was stubborn, more so than anyone Dean had ever known. Carrie had always said he got it from his father. Jo's description led Dean to wonder if maybe it was a bit of Mary, too. Their whole family was made of people digging in their heels.

Dean wondered if Sam thought he was just being stubborn, too.

Sam clung on, flicking his eyes over Dean's face, as though looking for an answer. Dean stared back, willing him to see the truth, and finally, Sam released him and stepped back.

Dean's hands moved with such fury that even he couldn't follow their meaning. He finally gave up, settling for simply glaring more, and Sam went back to staring at the ground, kicking bits of gravel this way and that.

"I just --" he started, then pinched the bridge of his nose, his shoulders heaving once as he tried to collect himself. "I don't want the last things I hear in your voice to be from that _thing_. I want to hear _you_ , Dean. You're the only one I have left."

Dean looked away, unable to meet his brother's eyes. He knew that if he looked, Sam would see right through him and know the truth. Dean was the reason he'd lost all of it, everyone who cared about him. Dean was meant to be the one left as a pile of nameless ash, marked only by a rough stone and a circle of scorched grass.

*

Dean didn't remember everything about the night he'd damned his family. He remembered flickering red and gold, the sharpness of smoke as it struck the back of his mouth and wound down his throat. He remembered his father's eyes, wide and empty as they stared down from the impossible height of the ceiling. He didn't remember going to Sam's room, didn't know how he'd gone from being pressed to the wall to standing on the grass outside his burning home.

He remembered knowing, even as his mother pressed Sam into his arms and steered him towards his godparents on the edge of the lawn, that it was all his fault. He remembered the weight of that guilt dragging his stomach down as his mother turned away and walked into the flames without a backwards glance. He remembered believing that if he kept Sam safe, held onto him tight enough, that his mom might forgive him. That she'd come back for them.

Everything he'd learned in those six months on the road hunting down spirits and demons and family secrets only reinforced that. His mom had always been the strong one, the smart one, the one who knew how to handle things. If she'd been upstairs that night, she could have stopped the demon then and there, instead of having to wait for twenty-two years.

But she hadn't been upstairs, so Dad was the one to face the demon. Dad had never been a hunter, had no idea what he was facing, and it killed him. And Dean remembered as sharply as anything else why his mom hadn't been the one in that room.

Because Dean had woken and asked her for a glass of milk.

*

He should have known that Sam would see it, anyway.

Sam stepped forward, hands reaching. Dean flinched, but Sam moved too quickly. He caught Dean's chin between his palms, pulling Dean's gaze upward into his.

"Hey," he said, and his voice held Dean in place as firmly as his hands. "It's not your fault."

Dean snarled, jerking back, but Sam held on. There was no supernatural weight in his words, just the force of pure Sam, something they both knew Dean had no defense against. "It's _not_ your fault, Dean."

Dean's hands clenched against the edge of the trunk. There wasn't enough room between them to sign.

"She saved our lives," Sam said. Dean tried to shake his head, but Sam's hands held on firm. "That was her choice. And she made the right one."

Dean sucked in a breath. His eyes ached. One of Sam's thumbs shifted up, rubbing against Dean's cheekbone, leaving a wet smear in its wake. Dean barely had time to register what that meant before Sam leaned his head down, resting his forehead on Dean's.

"C'mon, man," Sam said. "You're too smart for this."

Dean did shake his head, then, a bare twitch, and his hands came up of their own volition, twisting into the front of Sam's shirt. He could feel Sam's chest shuddering under his grip. Sam's hand lifted from his cheek, rubbing over the top of his head before it came to rest on the back of his neck.

"Please, Dean."

They stayed like that, heads together, hands hanging on, until the shaking in both their bodies slowed, until their breathing evened. Dean's face felt wet and raw as he pulled back just enough to look up. Sam's eyes were red and puffy, but they held firm. Dean wondered what he could possibly see that made him look at him like that.

"We're not broken," Sam said, and though it wasn't the first time Dean had heard the words, it may have been the first time he thought he could believe them.

Sam tilted his head up towards the sky and Dean followed his gaze. It was a clear night, and Bobby's place was far enough out of town for there to be plenty of stars. He knew a few constellations, the ones that had supernatural significance anyway. When they'd been younger, he and Sam would sometimes make them up, drawing their own lines and shapes in the sky. 'The booger' had been a favorite, or 'the farting baboon.' Dean didn't spot any of those tonight, just a scattering of lights, the glow of distant, smokeless fires.

A warm wind kicked up, carrying with it the scents of engine oil and gun powder and underneath, a note of bright, May green. Dean's nostrils flared, and he sighed.

"Happy birthday, Sammy."

Sam looked down, his eyes wide, his lips twitching. He stared at Dean. Dean tilted his head, thinking it must have come out wrong. Sam shook his head.

"I take it back," he said, a flicker of humor crossing his face. "You don't have to talk. You sound like a frog."

Dean smacked him in the back of the head, then started for Bobby's house without looking back. He knew Sam would follow. It was the unwritten rule, the most important thing that their parents had left them.

Wherever the Winchester brothers went, they went together.

  
 _She says "Life's a game we're meant to lose  
But stick by me and I will stick by you."_  
\-- A Girl, a Boy, and a Graveyard, Jeremy Messersmith


End file.
